I'm out the door on Monday for a road bicycle ride and go out Del AMo, north on the San Gabriel river trail t a convenenient turn-around point, and then turn south. When I get back to Carson I see a ride in yellow in the distance and he seems to be goingabout the same speed as I am. Thus I turn up the energy level and, in spurts, catch him before the bridge. I hear him sucking my rear wheel and forthe next four miles to the ocean we take turns pulling each other. When we get down to the ocean we still crank along to the peninsula and along the ocean, but then we both pace back a shade and have a very nice conversatio about cycling in various parts of the world. At home I grab a quick shower and start in on the web-scraping. I realize hat if I change the "corrected" fomrat just a bit, the follwoing plots and dashboard will be easier to implement. So I g back and re-edit the two classes of events and write a bit of code to read the data and make sure it makes sense. This is my favorite time of year because the weather is warm enough in the morning to go cycling early, the roses and carnations are growing wildly, the grass is green with minimal watering, F1 and MotoGP/2/3 championships are starting to take shape, baseball has started, and the ice hockey playoffs have also just started. Near 1pm I take a break and have veggie burritos for lunch and watch a final Netflix episode about the cold war. Now I can go back to that Thai series. I go out and get down n my hands and knees and wax the gold rims of the World Rally Car. This is hard work 'cuz you're on your knees, constantly twisting your back, arms, and shoulders to get into every nook and cranny. But by about 3pm I'm done and the World Rally Car looks just like it came off the showrom floor 22 years ago (except for expected road chips and a bit of wear and tear).
I start Wednesday a bit late but get in a good, but windy, mountain bicycle ride. The windy portions give me a chance t either push extra hard against the wind or slow down a bit and ride the wind. At home I try to sneak up on the Salvadoran neighborhood gardeners who typically do my gardening when I am out of town. I run up behing them, raise my arms in the air to pretend to be a monster, and yell, "Chupacabra". They love this! We have a brief discussion and then they cut their lawns and I cut my lawn. AFter a shower I work on the dashboard for that web-scraping effort and find a youtube video of the Long Beach Grand Prix highlights (in thirty minutes) and I watch that in place of the blacked-out/unrecorded race from this past Sunday. Today I cook fish and chips for lunch to try and gain back a pound or two that I recently lost and start building strength for a "proposed" long road bicycle ride on Friday.
On Thursday I sleep a bit late and have a not-so-ggood workout with the weights as most of the lifts are a struggle and the repetitions for most lifts are down. I then ride the new motorcycle all of the way up to Century City to see the dentist who installed my implant posts. It seems one may have moved and the prosothdontist down in Long Beach and this doctor/surgeon need to take a look at it. This doctor says that one of the implants has an infection and will not e usefull. So he gives me an amoxcillin-based antibiotic though I told him pure amoxcillin will make me break out in hives. He said I had this combined antibiotic in the hospital with no problem, so we'll give it a try. But then I have to go back under anesthesia to clean out the area and rmeove the useless implant post. The remaining two posts should be strong enough for the future. And I tell the doctor to give me a different anesthesis this time because the last one had bad side affects for a week. So he agrees to just give me a single anesthesia and we'll schedule the procedure in May. This is the first real setback I've had under both the bicycle accident and the entire cancer treatment and I'm very disappointed. I'm very disappointed. I ride on home and I'm still getting used to the YZF-R3 bt its going to be fun when I can wind it up. At home I watch some ice hockey and work on processing the web-scraping tool. I vow to keep myself super-productive during my time of disappointment. Data scientists and AI and cleaning data 'cuz bad data might "look about right" but can skew the results very badly.)
I want to start Friday with a long road bicycle ride, but when I pull the bicycle out I see that the rear tire is flat. Thus I take the mountain bicycle out on this windy day and push hard to get a better than recovery workout. At home I weedwack the rosebeds and grab a shower. I catch FP2 for MotoGP from SPain and enjoy it and later in the day catch FP2 for Moto2. In between IU grab lunch, trim the roses and bring more rose and carnation blooms into the house, and then I fix the road bicycle tire so that it's ready for a Saturday ride. During the ice hockey games I order two new road bicycle tires and four inner tubes (i.e., two for the front and two for the rear since they have different valve lengths). I should be stocked up for the road bicycle tires and tubes for a while now.
On Saturday I start north on the Los Angeles river trail and seem to be fighting a very slight headwind. I get to the El Monte dam and take surface streets to the Santa Fe dam. I stop for an energy gel and feel no wind at all and start back south. By now the wind over here, probably due to local terrain and buildings, is again a slight headwind. I'm making good progress and start seeing all of the direction signs and soom I see that a triathlon is using this course and soon I see the lead rider, going in the opposite direction, go flying past me. Thus I'm extra diligent about staying out of everyone's way and I vow to beat the lead triathlete back to my turn off at Del Amo. I fail. I held him off for twenty kilometers but he catches me and passes me before I turn for home. It's a very good 100 kilometer ride. After a warming shower I watch MotoGP/2/3 qualifying - all in mixed wet/dry conditions and the races should be fun with jumbled starting positions. Today's ride has taken a lot out of me so I watch a lot of ice hockey and do some house cleaning but have a very slow day.
I sleep incredibly well on Saturday night into Sunday morning and reset the alarm for a bit of extra sleep. Everything is tired but I get out on the mountain bicycle for my typical Sunday recovery rides. Today there is a running race along the ocean and, of course, a fair number of the runners run on the bike trail rather than the newly-built (i.e., eight years ago) running trail. This was meant to separate the runners and cyclists and prevent collisions. Regardless I have to avoid a lot of runners but have a good ride considering how tired everything on my body is. I grab a quick shower and do some grocery shopping and sitback for the wildest Tissot Sprint MotoGP race you can imagine - my favorite rider gets second from ninth on the grid (mostly due to other crashes) and the old man, Dani Pedrosa, gets all of the way to fourth and just missing the podium by a tenth of a second. This exciting race has taken a lot out of mentally, thus the rest of Sunday is super slow with some ice hockey and baseball on television.
I start Monday with an eighty minute run/walk. I've put together a realistic spreadsheet and this eighty mnute/run walk translates to about fifteen kilometers of running. When I get home I take a short break and then trim the roses - concentrating on removing older blooms and shoots that are growing towards the middle of each rosebush. After a warming shower and reading the news and markets I run a few errands and then visit my primary care physician. I tell him the highlights: 120 kilometer bicycle rides, 20 kilometer runs, lifting wweeights to regain strength, and the implant infection. We talk back and forth and we both agree that I should reduce some of my medications and increase others. We'll try to reduce the one set of medications gradually towards zero but spike up one to a double dose. I completely agree with everything that we've discussed and will start on Wednesday 1 May. Why Wednesday 1 May? Because it will be easier to keep track of then Tuesday 30 April. Let's keep life simple. At home I finally cook lunch approaching 2 pm and watch a fun-filled Moto3 race from Jerez, Spain. I would give up on life if MotoGP/2/3 did not exist. I update a couple of websites for the turnover of the month. Later I try to gather my thoughts from today's primary care physicial meeting so that I abide by them and then watch some ice hockey playoff games. As I've stated before, a regular season ice hockey game is just a game but ANY playoff game has an order magnitude greater intensity.
I start Tuesday with a 65 kilometer bicycle ride. It takes at least 15 kilometers for me to get going but then I start cranking along nicely. For the ride up the Los Angeles river trail I'm cranking along nicely and as I'm exiting the guy I'm towing thanks me profusely for pulling him along. I passed him at the start of the northbound run and he's let hsi riding partners go to hold onto my rear wheel. I do some work on the sprinklers and they are ready for summer and heavy use. A warming shower gets me ready to go read the news and markets. Throughout the last week or so I've had some good ideas pop into my head related to both the web-scraping dashboard and the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. Now I just have to sit and code them and try them out. For lunch I have vegetables and rice and quinoa and watch the Moto2 race. Later in the day I catch some of the Dodgers' game and the ice hockey playof games. Unfortunatey the enthusiasm to implement the afore-mentioned coding solutions has fallen by the wayside.
Wednesday's planned day off from cycling or running starts with reading the news and markets. Near 8:30am I get out and lift weights for a decent workout and then I mow the lawn. I grab a quick shower and pack up old books to return to the Long Beach main library and I have three other new ones that I get. On the way home I stop in for Togo's and I'm shocked at how much higher the price is again. I enjoy a very close MotoGP race from Spain and later get outside to trim the roses and carnations and bring blooms into the house. I can only get past a third of the IndyCar race before I switch to other things.
Thursday starts with a mountain bicycle ride, weedwacking the roses, and a warm shower. I read the news and markets and watch another thirdof the IndyCar race with lunch. Then I go outside I put the two new bicycle tired that just arrived onto old rims to stretch them out (as these tires tend to be tight to put on when new). But this goes easier than expected. Thus I go back inside the house and read through the program for tomorrow's senior design Expo at Calfiornia State University in Los Angeles. I pick out the interesting topics and mark them to see. It will be the first time I've been to the campus in a year and I've written a long letter and preprinted a number of copies to give to fculty and staff to explain where I've been for the last 18 months or so. I work a bit on debugging the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm and make a bit ofprogress and then go to install the Cat Blaster into the baby stroller. But one of the sensors keeps "firing" and I must have pinched a wire or partially shorted something when I was trying to jam the electronics cover on. So I'll have to debug and make it more robust. It's been a good day and so I relax with the rest of the IndyCar race and then an ice hockey playoff game before tomorrow's full day of events at CSULA.
Initially I intend to go running very early on Friday morning, bit I turn off the alarm and reset it to skip running. When I get up I ride the new motorcycle upto CSULA and see old friends and new students. I pass out nine copies of "my story" over the last eighteen months and watch some very good senior design projects and some that are lacking. In a computer science presentation I make friends with a new faculty member and I give her my contact information so that we can see if we can work on things together. I skip lunch and just ride on home. Vegetables and pasta acoompany the F1 sprint qualifying session from Miami and then I watch some of the ic ehockey playoffs.
Saturday starts with a good eighty kilometer bicycle ride. When I get home there is a distress call from my schoolteacher neighbor and I call her home and mobile numbers and get no answer. I grab a shower and run some errands and then call my neighbor again. Still no answer. And the newspaper has not been picked up off the driveway. I go over to the garage and try to find the spare key which the retired schoolteacher has told me is "hanging on a hook to the right when you walk in the garage side door". It's my fault for not having her physically show me where it is, but I can't find it. I enlist two neighbors, one by text and one as he drives by, to help me look for the key. We need to get in and see that she's either not there (and probably in a hospital) or has left us. It's neither one! She manages to get to her phone and back door and let us in. Visibly she is in tremendous distress and one of the neighbors, who works for the sheriffs department, calls 911. Eventually fire and paramedics come and I insist that they take her to a hospital because she looks terrible and is extremely unsteady on her feet. We find tons of keys in her house and we take the time to find a set of keys that she can take with her to the hospital and another set that I can keep if I need it. This gets squared away and by the time these events are over, it is past 1:15pm and I have not eaten anything yet. So I pop open a bottle of wine and drink as I bake fish and chips for lunch. Later I watch the F1 sprint race from Miami and an ice hockey playoff game - another game seven! It's been a trying day
Hear rain falling, drying but windy, lift weights - good session, bring light weights into the house for full extension shoulder exercises throughout the days, F1 qualifying (day behind), retired schoolteacher back home but can't move much, two hours in morning, Dodgers' game and ice hockey playoff games, two more hours with retired schoolteacher, repeating herself and forgetting stuff much more than 72 hours ago.
On Monday I wake up before 6:30am with sunlight already shining and realize that I accidentally shut my phone alarm off the other day. I think about what to do, but I end up putting on running clothes and get out for a good 75 minute run/walk. I feel good and strong throughout but will push the distance again next week. At home I trim the roses and carnations and bring more new blooms into the house and grab a shower. I do some worok on a website with events coming in for May a bit late and the calendar section has to be updated. Then I check on the neighbor and she is doing much better but I still spend an hour over there. When I come back home I finally watch the F1 race from Miami with a new winner in F1. Later I watch some ice hockey playoff games.